Attaining the details about the daily life of soldiers on the Three Peaks is not easy, taking into consideration the existence of mainly official sources, such as department diaries, reports, and dispatches. Only through some visual sources, a few personal diaries or letters sent from the front, or some details of the infrastructures can we, at times, have an idea of the progress of the daily life of those who faced each other on the plateau at the time.
For example, the alpino Paolo Barzan, in his personal diary, shares some moments of a day on the front, divided as it was between religiosity, war, propaganda and joy for food:
“Today we inaugurated la villetta [the officers’ barracks, which had begun on August 23], our pastor celebrated Holy Mass. At Santus our cannon fired eight shots. After the mass our pastor, that is, Don Pietro made a beautiful sermon of patriotic words. I said to myself: Don Matteo is good at his sermons, but also our Don Pietro, already called father of the Alpines, is no less. This day our officers offered us a special mess of polenta and cod and half a liter of wine”. Here, then, even a meal out of the ordinary, in the high mountains, became an event to remember in the diary!1Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Pieve Santo Stefano, Diario dell’alpino Paolo Barzan, ADN_MG/T3, 12 settembre 1915.
Other glimpses of everyday life are present in photographs or unofficial drawings, as in a rare drawing by Lodovico Pogliaghi, which shows the soldiers at a moment of rest inside a barrack. An unusual image for Pogliaghi, who, as a artist-soldiers sent specifically by the Italian General Staff tended to celebrate and immortalize life in the shadow of the Three Peaks with patriotic tones, loved to represent the majestic Dolomite settings and the most “memorable” events.2Museo Centrale del Risorgimento di Roma, Pogliaghi, Lodovico, Riposo nella baracca, MCRR_VED14_42.
There are also essential structures, which usually did not have a privileged place in the official documentation: these include bathrooms and latrines, which however were never lacking near every camp or barrack. In some cases, they had ironic names, such as the latrine indicated in Austrian sources as “Villa D’Annunzio”, on the north side of the Torre di Toblin/Toblinger Knoten. In other cases, as in the Steinhart tunnel, east of the Forcella di San Candido/Innichriedl, the pit toilet is still visible today, more than a century after its construction, in one of the niches dug for the fusiliers.